I think that true love/perfect love is possible, has happened, can happen. I just think the chances are rare and that in general the term love is so painfully over used its almost been murdered. Every teenage girl loves every teenage boy she's ever crushed on. Love is a word many men toss around for its value in solidifying the affections of weak hearted women.

Perhaps we should all simple attempt to care for each other than more towards the grander notion of love instead of starting there and ending with resentment and disgust?

Romantic love is typically blind. We feel it for those we don't really know. And it tends to be very me-oriented: I love her because of the way I fell when I'm with her; because I have fun when I'm with her; because I find her beautiful, sexy, smart, funny and so on. A more mature love comes when we care more about that person's happiness than we do our own-the selfess love that parents show toward children. Romantic love drives us to be with the other person at all coast; mature love drives us to want to see the other person happy, even if that means not being with us.

I might also suggest that love is the realm of reason, infatuation is the realm of emotion, and lust is the realm of instinct.

Conscious mind vs subconscious mind vs genetics.

As soon as you become unable to differentiate between these things, it greatly increases the likelihood a romantic relationship will risk crashing and burning to the ground.

love is the realm of reason

I have to nitpick a bit here.
Nothing about love screams "logic" to me. Now, there might be a certain element of all three (reason, emotion, lust) present in love, I'll give you that.

The first attraction will always be physical. You see the person, and then want to get to know them better. This would fall under lust, or instinct. Emotion follows, as you then develop feelings for the person. This would be where most people (including myself) get lost in an infatuation, or a romantic love as others were putting it. While some people make lists of pros and cons before dating someone, I'm one of those who will then likely toss said list out the window and go with their heart. I think its hard to approach something like love rationally, because feelings and personal experiences will get in the way.

I like how Stitches put it. Unfortunately, I've yet to experience a "mature love." I've been in many relationships, and for the longest time I thought that I'd only truly loved that first person. As I think about it now though, I'm coming to realize that it was more of an infatuation and that I'm slowly approaching a more mature love, where there's less of that "I need to be with them" feeling and more of a caring for their happiness.